Apropos of the earlier discussion of noisy museums, which also took up creative use of sounds, I wondered what people thought of performance artist LuLu LoLo's piece at Museo del Barrio in nyc -- bringing smells into the museum:
OFFICE HOURS: COOKIE BREAK, is a performance that touches on all of the five senses; the sweet smell of cookies baking filters through the air, enticing the staff of El Museo Del Barrio to leave their offices to take a Cookie Break and see what is happening in the kitchen in the midst of their workday. Fabulous LuLu LoLo bakes goodies for them to taste and touch. Instead of the silence of their solitary work, they can listen to each other. The sixth sense is the emotional memory of LuLu LoLo's grandmothers, who filled their tenement apartments in East Harlem with the smell of baking and the sampling of food with their families and neighbors. http://us7.campaign-archive2.com/?u=8691a366768fadf696148b727&id=4340810e9a&e=d37187e7ce (scroll down to get to it:)
More directly on the sound question, the New-York Historical Society's Slavery in New York exhibit around 2005, which I think Kathleen Hulser took the lead on, had a brilliant evocation of enslaved women talking around a well, with a structure evocative of a well, and women's voices in conversation audible around it. Visitors eavesdropped on their disembodied conversation, and had to strain to make sense of it -- intensifying the experience of wanting to learn about people who had left few records of their own making.
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Ellen Gruber Garvey, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of English, New Jersey City University
Author, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance
Visit the Scrapbook History website -------------------------------------------